Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

The Other Carnegies

Q.Someone told me that Dale Carnegie, the expert on salesmanship and public speaking, was named after Carnegie Hall. True?

A. True. Dale Carnegie, the author of the perennial best seller “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (1936), was born Dale Carnagay on a Missouri farm in 1888, according to the Encyclopedia of New York City. A salesman and failed actor, he moved to New York and began teaching public speaking at the Young Men’s Christian Association.

In time, Carnagay opened his own office. It was in the Carnegie Hall Building, next to the concert hall on West 57th Street, and the teacher adopted its name.

Photo

Dale Carnegie with his book “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”Credit
Associated Press

Dale Carnegie died in Forest Hills Gardens, Queens, in 1955. Today, Dale Carnegie Training programs offer courses in 25 languages and in 80 countries. His 1936 classic has sold more than 15 million copies, according to Amazon.com.

Dale Carnegie was not the only famous person believed to have taken the name of the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who financed the construction of Carnegie Hall and whose mansion on 91st Street and Fifth Avenue is now the Cooper-Hewitt Museum.

Henrietta Kanengeiser (1886-1956), who moved to New York from Vienna and became one of the country’s foremost fashion designers in the 1930s and ’40s, took the name Hattie Carnegie, apparently after Andrew, according to the Encyclopedia of New York City.

She moved to the Lower East Side before 1900 to join her immigrant father, and began her career as a teenage messenger girl at Macy’s with a wardrobe of three blouses and a skirt. Later, her own retail shop was at 42 East 49th Street. She also made millinery, jewelry, perfume and cosmetics.

With their rags-to-riches stories, their personalities and, in Hattie’s case, her own fashion appearances, Hattie Carnegie and Dale Carnegie were their businesses’ own best advertisements.